I am going to be building a tow dolly for garden tractor relocation, and the project has taken off in the last 2 or 3 days in design stage. I had the idea back when Kenny built his wheel lift, just never got around to starting. I had a good plan until Kenny (cooped up in his house lol) had to give himself something to do. Kenny asked me the plan I had , which was all a solid design so that you MUST lift and hook at the same time. Well, that wasn't good enough for Kenny so he took it upon himself to take my original idea, and build on it. He took the last two days and built the entire dolly on Sketchup, with my input of the parts I already had and intended to use, and made quite a mechanism. So while I have been cleaning Kenny has helped me greatly, and essentially generated a shopping list for me the next time I went to the scrap yard. I just got back from the scrap yard and had quite a successful visit, I had 3-4 sizes in my head and my tape measure.

I found 3 pieces of thickwall 2 inch box tubing, each 47 inches long, painted, and straight, perfect. Also found some 1.5 inch square tubing, and then some other pieces of steel for another project. I was going to use 3 inch channel for the draw tongue originally, but the piece I have wont me long enough to have room for a boat hand winch. Bad thing is the ball coupler I have is designed for 3 inch channel, so I may just have to weld up a transition piece to pin onto the 2 inch (receiver setup) and then I could easily use my 24 dollar coupler on other build projects. Last I checked I can only use one trailer at a time LOL.

Kenny will be along to load up the undimensioned Sketchup drawings he did, and congratulate me on the steel lol. Kenny, I am not using any flat stock or 3 inch channel, will be ALL 2 inch... so you half win LOL.

Well, Casey has begun this, so I better upload the drawings. This is what I had in my head. What he builds is what he has visioned. LOL Here you all go:
What I would really like to design is a miniature car dolly. Think that would be awesome for moving the tractors.

I look forward to following this build. My question, how will you pick up the front(or back) of the tractor? Im sure you could lift some tractors by pushing the front down, but what about the heavier tractors? Other then that I think its a very solid design.

I plan to put a manual boat winch right on the dolly to avoid having to mess with the tractor winch since it probably wont turn with that winch on it.

Forklifts are NOT all terrain.

Will probably actually start welding it up this weekend. Have to finish cleaning up my shop the rest of this week before I get real busy on this. Figured since Kenny helped design, I would set this up in a build thread.

We build our ideas off of each others ideas. They always did say two heads were better than one, and I'm glad I don't have 2 heads myself LOL. Oh, and Kenny just wants to get me to start and finish something I planned on doing lol.

What about getting some thick steel plates, cut to a size of 6" wide x 10" in length, and mounting them to the cross bar of your axle, with pivots. These would be resting areas for the front tires to ride on. Just like a regular two wheeled car dolly. The plates could pivot with the tractor while driving over different terrains. Use 1" ratchet straps to tie down the tractor tires to the steel plates. You would only need the your boat winch then, to get the tractor up on the tire carriers.

Instead of making the axle cross member a solid piece of steel, cut the axle, and install smaller tubing in both halves, so that the axle can be adjustable in width. Then you wouldn't be limited to just one size tractors.

Troy, the design is actually to be no more than 4 foot wide and still haul them with ease. I don't like car dollys because they are hard to get the wheels on them. With the design I am not limited to one size of tractor because I will build some adjustablity in the lift point. I am actually very happy with the current design and will build on the fly LOL. I ave a solid axle already because thats something I saved at the scrap yard last year lol.

I think you guys are on to something good here. I agree that pulling flat tires or no tires onto a dolly is a pain. This idea of lift and go seems right on target for ease of use.
Going to be interesting to watch this.
Thanks for posting this project.

Secondly, this is just too weird. Today, I was in the shop, rethinking a tractor lifting gizmo idea, that I had been mulling
over for a while now. Honest to goodness, I thought today, "Hey, this would make a good thread. Kenny sketches it, and I build it"